UPDATE: At 2:45 Pacific, we heard from Amazon that the company has changed its mind. Some one must have gotten around to asking Jeff Bezos.

One of the most staggeringly insensitive and stupid corporate statements ever made, from Amazon.com, where I used to buy a whole bunch of stuff:

But mainstream Web sites that had jumped to pull in money for the tsunami victims showed no evidence of repeating it here in the U.S. for Katrina’s. Amazon.com, which raised more than $14 million for the American Red Cross in January via a donation link on its home page, didn’t have one as of mid-day Monday. Nor did Google, Yahoo, MSN, or eBay, all of which hustled earlier in the year to put up donation links on their portals. (Google slapped up an “Information about Hurricane Katrina” link on its Spartan home page, but that led to news sources and stories.)

An Amazon spokesperson said that the online retailer had no plans to post a donation link on its site. “Each case is different,” she said. “The Red Cross has essentially given over its entire site to donations. The tsunami came out of the blue, so it was an ‘all hands on deck’ situation, but the Red Cross has been getting ready for this and getting its message out there for several days.”